Plastic Fantastic

Yesterday, Kevin and I had brunch with Kota Ezawa and Katya Bonnenfant and their 3-month-old daughter, Masha.  I don't usually relate to babies much, but Masha is adorable.  Her sense of presence and otherness is fascinating.  I said, "She looks like she hasn't quite arrived."  Katya said that in some Native American cultures the child is said to arrive only after she laughs—before that she's seen as being in an in-between space—and there is a celebration to honor the child's laughter.  Masha, according to child development charts, is due to laugh in a couple of weeks.  After brunch we drove to Kota's studio, where he showed us some of the stereoscopic images he made for an exhibit of the New Children's Museum entitled Trash.

Here's Kevin looking through a stereoscopic viewer as Kota looks outside the frame at Katya.

In the evening, Kevin and I went to the annual group costume birthday dance party for Gerald Corbin, Craig Goodman, and Karla Milosevich.  The theme this year was plastic.  The photo to the left is me in the dress I made by adding a belt to a transparent yellow rain poncho.  That's Karla in the background in a much more elaborate outfit, purple and yellow like a pirate, sexy like a gypsy, and her beautiful smile.  Pointing to my yellow hood, Ben Furstenberg said I had a space age druid thing going on.  In the dance room DJs were spinning thumping retro club music so loudly you could hear it all the way down the street, and on a wall was projected clips from 80s rock videos and trashy films.  I danced, of course I danced, which was daring, given the still-mending back, but I'd done 40 minutes of yoga earlier in the evening, and I was fine.  I had to force myself to go to the party, feeling peopled-out, but ended up having a great time.  Not much was expected of me, and it was such a pleasure to be part of a group hilarity that had nothing to do with me.  I could be totally present and anonymous at the same time.  Talking was reduced to shouting in the kitchen, and of course much of the conversation centered around the costumes.  Matt Gordon, draped in a shower curtain robe, was who I talked with the most.  We did manage to catch up and to gossip, and then he too was bopping around on the dance floor.

I didn't take any photos, but here's a few more that Kevin clicked with his iphone, starting with a crowd scene featuring Craig (in the white) and Karla.

Here's another group pic, with Craig in it.  If you look closely, you can see the intricate laticework headdress of balls connected by rods.  When Craig announced he was a polymer, someone asked him if he was an actual polymer or the scientist who invented the polymer.  Craig paused thoughtfully, and said, "A little of both."

Here's Gerald wearing a gown he sewed out of a shower curtain.  He said that if I ever wanted my own shower curtain gown, he'd make one for me.











Here's Scott Hewicker and Darrell Alvarez, wearing the most amazing hats.

The party was a good transition from a very public phase to what I hope will be a more private, winter hibernation and rejuvenation.  This is code for:  I'm dying to lose myself in writing.  All the repurposed table clothes and garbage bags and shower curtains I saw last night made the world feel plastic in that other sense of the word, meaning malleable, capable of being reformed.  The way things of the world open to you in the heat of writing.  I got a wonderful email from Dana Ward yesterday, where he told me how something I wrote in a recent blog post clicked for him, how it resonated with strands of thinking he's been engaged in, and gave him an entry into pulling it all together.  Dana clearly is in that glorious phase of writing, where you're high with the magic of the world, of language, where the difference between the two blurs in ways that ordinary mortals cannot comprehend.  I feel so envious of Dana.  This is what I'm craving—to get back to that place myself.  That heightening is what really keeps us going back to writing year after year, regardless of fame or no fame, or whatever anybody thinks of the work.  I imagine a sacred circle around Dana, etched in the earth, as he performs miracles.

Lying Low

Kevin took this picture.  I call it "Cats on Bed as Low Lying Rocks."  I came across it on iphoto when looking to see if Kevin had downloaded any Thanksgiving pix, which he apparently hasn't.  The lithograph on the wall is
"Death of the Poet" by Fran Herndon, from the series she did for Jack Spicer's Homage to Creeley.  It's been at the foot of the bed for years and I've spent so many hours vacantly staring at it, it's entered my blood.

My back hasn't fully recovered, but it's doing much better.  The flow of red wine at Thanksgiving yesterday at Karla Milosevich's was a nice relief from the pain.  It was a huge Thanksgiving, like 30 people, great food, great music, all vinyl, on an incredible sound system.  Margaret Tedesco set herself up as dj for much of the evening.  A particular hit was We Five's "You Were on My Mind," which is really a sucky song, but in the moment it was like heaven.  I told anybody who would listen that when I was in junior high, our lesbian gym teacher would play the album while we were in the showers.  She was short and round like a basketball.  I chatted and played with people for hours, I was not at all grumpy, morose, or withdrawn.  A student who's never taken a class with me recently told me that some students find me intimidating, so Thanksgiving was good practice for the new non-intimidating Dodie.  Though, thankfully, there were no students there.  I heard all sorts of great stories and information, but what comes to mind is Bruno Fazzolari's mini-lecture at dinner about the history of scent.  As part of his art practice, Bruno creates perfume.  I do not like perfume, but I love the bottle of Bruno's that Kevin brought home one day, after he visited Bruno's studio.  As we discussed the hierarchy of the senses, Kevin grew excited over the idea that when you smell, actual molecules enter your body.  Bruno said that sight reigns in Western Culture to the extent that while scientists know everything about the mechanism of sight, the physiology of scent still isn't totally understood.  As an example of how emotional our reactions to scents are, Bruno told of a radio program where the announcer said they were going to send out scents via radio waves, and, no surprise, the audience reported various smell-related reactions.  Bruno's telling of this was infinitely better than what I'm putting down here.  Just now I'm flashing to another part of the evening, of Anne McGuire playing with a small pumpkin.  She'd hold it upsidedown by the stem, pretending it was a mike as she lip-synched the backup for whatever record Margaret was spinning.  At one daring moment, she put the pumpkin under her jacket, turned sideways and struck up a huge-breasted pin-up pose. 

During my back recuperation I've been reading Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, about Ted Bundy.  Rule worked with Bundy at a Seattle crisis clinic, back in the day before he was Ted Bundy.  I'm not really interested in the murders.  You can read about them online, and I in fact did read about them online, last Saturday, the first day in weeks where I had nothing at all scheduled.  I had all these plans for great accomplishments, and I'd even turned off the modem to keep me from fucking around online, but I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry on Bundy, on my iphone, since you don't need WiFi to use the internet on the iphone.  It's a long article, and I read the entire thing, tiny screen after tiny screen.  It was 5:00 p.m., I was slouched on the couch still in flannel pajamas, and I felt miserably useless and abject, but I couldn't stop myself from moving on to the next tiny screen. What I find interesting about Rule's book is the ways Bundy mimicked normalcy, even empathy.  And all the groupies, how he married while he was on death row and even fathered a child.  Kevin says all the imprisoned serial killers have wives, didn't you know that, Dodie?  Having read so much lately about charismatic leaders, especially gurus, it seems that the charisma of the serial killer is cut from the same cloth, just another bleep on the same continuum.  It's all about pathological narcissism, the pornography of control.  And of course this all connects back to the buddhist for me.  That sense when I was with him that there was something missing in him that other people have.  It's hard to explain, but it was eerie.  When I was younger I got involved with a lot of weird people, but I've never experience this sense of something missing.  It was the sort of thing where you bring somebody into your home and the cats flee and the dog starts growling.  Do I remember in the Ann Rule book her saying that her super-friendly dog shunned Bundy?  Maybe I made that up, I've been reading so eclectically and talking to so many people lately, it's all a blur, these bits of information pop up in my head and I can't remember who or where it came from.

An example of the weird people I slept with in my my 20s.  My book Pink Steam ends with a story called "Not Clinical, But Probable," about a love affair with a schizophrenic.  I dedicated the piece to John Wieners because I wove bits of his poetry throughout.  To this day there is a rumor that I had an affair with John Wieners, which is amusingly ludicrous.  The schizophrenic poet in the piece was a compilation of not one, but three different schizophrenics I had slept with, none of them Wieners.  I did spend one lovely evening with John Wieners, with Kevin and Raymond Foye.  We went to dinner and out for drinks at Tosca Cafe in North Beach.  Afterwards, Wieners asked us if we'd like some digestive aids, and he went into a corner store in Chinatown and bought us each a pack of Lifesavers.  I keep that pack of Lifesavers in a drawer in my desk.  Here's a photo of it I clicked this morning:

Embraced

Donal Mosher sent a link for his latest post to his photo/text-based blog, GhostType.  I love Donal's blog, the intimacy of both his photos and his writing.  Can one write directly about one's personal experience with honesty and directness, and not be an egomaniac?  Donal's work makes me believe that, yes, we can do this.  I particularly loved his Halloween post, touching upon the intensity of working on his and Mike Palmieri's next feature documentary, about the horrors of medical testing and prescription drugs:

Thanks to editing the new film, the terrors of this season are medical testing gone awry, drug induced suicide, and war trauma –hauntings that belong to others but bleed just as easily into the holiday as any of the domestic terrors my family have to face.   I catch glimpses of pharmaceutical side effects in the bubbly skin and the vacant eyes of a Walgreens’ monster mask. A plastic severed limb sets off flashes of the bloody photos and footage we were given by a very young medic who suffers PTSD from his service in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

Donal's blending of inner and outer, personal and cultural expands the self rather than fetishizing it.  A tone of openness and vulnerability needn't be all stagy; it can be disconcerting in its humbleness.

I'm supposed to be spending the day in bed, due to having pulled out my lower back yesterday.  Big time.  Karen, my chiropractor, agreed to stay late to see me.  I didn't know if I was even capable of making it to her office, the pain was so unbearable.  Karen's in the final year of a 5-year osteopathy program, for which she flies to Vancouver several times a year.  She—and osteopathy—are amazing.  No cracking.  Karen worked on me for like an hour, and a day later I'm sitting here in my brace, able to move about with minimal pain, and it's clear I'll be fine in a day or two, rather than the weeks of torment I've seen others go through with similar injuries.  The white brace encircling my waist reminds me of the truckload of cars I recently saw being hauled about in the rain, each wrapped in a white car raincoat, with clear patches over the front and rear windows.  The cars were directly in front of me on a day that was a bad day, emotionally, I can't remember why, but they instilled within me a sort of childlike glee, so I got out my iphone and waited for a stoplight and clicked a photo.  The white coverings look like hazmats for cars, which perfectly fits the post-apocalyptic Philip K. Dick I've been reading.

Moe's Books is having a Philip K. Dick event this evening:  Philip K. Dick's Exegesis: A Conversation, about the weird religion Dick received in visions.  At a party at Juliana Spahr's house Friday night, David Brazil was telling me about it, and I wanted to sit at his feet cross-legged and shout, "More, more."  Dick's religious experiences fascinate because they're in line with the readings I've been doing about cults and inspired teachings.  But going to Berkeley is not in synch with my order to stay in bed, so I'm having one of those should I/shouldn't I/what should I do moments.  Eileen Myles, who was here last week, and whom I had the luxury of spending time with three evenings in a row, seems to go through such decision crises frequently, with her eagerness to devour life, to not miss a minute of it.

The past few weeks have been insanely packed, all of it good, but overwhelming.  Reading with Ariana Reines and Stuart Krimko's visit at Dog Eared Books and Moe's (Kevin also joined us at Moe's), plus their visit to my Experimental Fiction seminar and our dinner afterwards.  Reading with Dennis Cooper at City Lights, and the dinner afterwards.  Dennis said his latest book, The Marbled Swarm, was not meant to be read outloud, but his reading was totally engaging.  The SFMOMA celebration for The Air We Breathe exhibit and book.  Eileen read a delightful (and smart) play in which her deceased dog Rosie appears on a puppet talk show.  The puppet's version of the horrors inflicted by humans: "They put their hands inside us!"  Elijah Burgher's show at [2nd Floor Projects].  The cleanse I did with Kathe Izzo.  The Grand Piano reading at Wheeler Hall in Berkeley, a choreographed extravaganza by eight of the project's authors.  Private dinners with Donna de la Perriere, Suzanne Stein, and Marcus Ewert.  The reading/party for Daniel Borzutzky and Ronaldo Wilson at the Josephine Miles house, where Judith Goldman, UC Berkeley's current Holloway poet, is staying.  (Insert praise for anything I haven't already praised, for it was all wonderful.)  Small Press Traffic's Steve Abbott event, featuring his daughter Alysia, who I've known since she was barely a teen.  Her slide lecture about her life with Steve was touching, and she convinced me that Steve's importance as a literary figure has been underestimated.  Robin Tremblay-McGaw's excellent write up of the event can be found here.  Later that evening there was a Right Window opening in the same space (Artists Television Access) for a video installation by Abner Nolan, of Nolan's son building a construction out of colored blocks.  The window in which the video was displayed was covered with plywood, with a hole cut out of it that hugged the construction the boy made.  This child-father project resonated perfectly with Alysia's talk about her father, even though the pairing was accidental.  My father was a carpenter and I'm taken back to how thrilling it was when I was a child to hammer nails in boards.  And when I was a graphic artist—before computer graphics, when the job involved a lot of physical skill—how I sometimes felt like a white collar version of my father, all the precise measuring and cutting, and the reign of the right angle.

I'll end with a few more images of the recent past.

The audience listening to Ariana at Dog Eared Books.
The fellow in the front with his head in his hand is Elijah Burgher.

Dennis Cooper and Ted Rees at Caffe Macaroni, after our reading at City Lights.

A group shot from Caffe Macaroni.

Margaret Tedesco and Ted Rees (he's everywhere I go)
at a dinner for Elijah Burgher a couple of days before his opening.

Daniel Borzutzky and Ronaldo Wilson.
These two, besides being super talented, definitely fit in the "fun" category.

Frank Smigiel toasting us all, at the Air We Breathe afterparty,
takeout from Fang's in the SFMOMA catering kitchen.  That's Eileen in the foreground.

Me with Ted Pearson at the Grand Piano event.
I have my typical deer in the headlight photo clench.
I love Barrett's weird hand gesture in the space between us.

Stretching back to October, Anna Moschovakis with geese in Golden Gate Park.
Her and John Sakkis' Poetry Center reading was also amazing and deserves a post all to itself.

So, anyway, as you can see, life has been fucking full.

Sylvia attacks Kevin's CCA ID badge

News Flash: Stuart Krimko Joining Me and Ariana Tonight!

Stuart Krimko has agreed to read with Ariana Reines and me tonight at Dog Eared Books (8 p.m., Valencia at 20th, San Francisco).  Ariana and Stuart are touring the West Coast together, and will also be reading Friday night at 7:30 at Moe's Books in Berkeley.

The three of us had a wonderful time together yesterday, driving to my class at SF State, where Ariana was the best class guest ever.  She instigated soulful discussions of writing and introduced rare issues for a grad writing class, such as the importance of bringing heart and morality into your work (and in a way it seemed that heart and morality were the same), and the vibrancy of form versus the emptiness of style.  I may be getting this wrong, but style, the way Ariana was using it, involves writing practices that become institutionalized and sapped of their original formal energy/radicality.  She opposed this to the formal genius of, say, Dennis Cooper or Genet.  Afterwards Stuart and Ariana and I went to Catch for dinner, the first time I'd been there since I had dinner there with the buddhist.  Ariana was reading at Small Press Traffic while I was having dinner with the buddhist, and I regretted not seeing her that weekend.  So returning to the scene of the crime with her completed a cycle, though this was an after the fact analysis, not a predetermined ritual or intention.  It was 50% off a bottle of wine Tuesday, so we imbibed Malbec and delicious food and talked and talked.  Around 10:30 we went back to my place, as Kevin was home from teaching at CCA, and I made ginger tea and the four of us chatted for another couple of hours, with a great sense of liveliness and ease.

This morning it seemed odd to me that Stuart would be sitting out this leg of his tour with Ariana, that it made sense for him to join us tonight, so I asked Ariana what she thought and she agreed.  I was reminded of how when I was in my 20s, when I took LSD, I couldn't bear to part with whomever I took it with.  For instance, one time here in San Francisco I dropped acid with my lover and a friend of his who was visiting from the East Coast, and the three of us had a magical evening together (including seeing Sarah Vaughn at the Concord Pavilion while we were peaking), and later back at my lover's place when it was time to go to bed, I insisted that the friend come to bed with us.  It wasn't a sex thing, I didn't like sex on acid, it was too literal for my grand surges of love, I just couldn't bear for the three of us to part.  I whined and whined but my lover said no.  Behind all this was the fact that when my lover lived back east he'd secretly carried on an intense affair with the guys' wife.  Even on acid, I knew not to blabber about that.  I wonder if this is how some communes formed in the 60s, people on drugs who couldn't bear to part.  But, anyway, Stuart and Ariana and I worked so well together hanging out, I felt we just had to read together tonight.

Here's info about Stuart copied from Moe's website:

Many of the poems in Hymns and Essays, Stuart Krimko's third collection, employ an almost abusive form of rhyme to address theological concerns.  It should come as no surprise, then, that he makes reference to such predecessors as Heinrich Heine, Shel Silverstein, and the 17th century English balladeer and joke-writer Thomas d'Urfey.  All humor aside, most of these poems are flecked with iridescent glints of rage, joy, and gloom.

The Final Two Books of Héctor Viel Temperley is Krimko's first published volume as a translator. Viel Temperley (1933-1987) was an Argentinean poet who achieved cult status as a writer of intensely surreal and mystical works.   Krimko has translated his last and perhaps most famous books, two long poems that are formally idiosyncratic investigations of faith.  'Crawl' approximates the breath of a swimmer as it juxtaposes maritime and Biblical imagery in violently strange tableaux.  'Hospital Británico' was written just before Viel Temperley's early death from cancer, and just after he underwent an operation for a brain tumor; in an interview at the time of its publication, he called it a 'book written by a man with a hole in his head.'

Stuart Krimko is the author of Not That Light (2005) and The Sweetness of Herbert (2009) both published by the Key West-based independent publisher Sand Paper Press.   Krimko 's poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like Fence, Maggy, the Poetry Foundation website, Post Road, and Vanitas.  In addition to his literary activities, Krimko has worked for many years in the art world.  He currently lives in Los Angeles, where is an Associate Director at David Kordansky Gallery.

Come See Me and Ariana!

I'll be reading with incredible Ariana Reines, tomorrow.  Here's the info, copied from the Fence Books website:

Wednesday November 9, 2011
8:00 pm
Dog Eared Books
900 Valencia St. (@ 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110

Ariana's promoting her hot-off-the-presses new book, Mercury.   A truly lovely thing to behold.  She's also visiting my experimental fiction seminar at SF State this afternoon.  Wow wow wow.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

The title of this post quotes Steve Jobs' last words, left over from a post I started days ago, but never wrote.  It's still a good title, don't you think?

Driving over to the cafe I'm sitting in, I was snacking on a dried fruit and nut mix in which all the ingredients were grown in California or Washington.  Persimmon, sour cherry sweetened with West Coast honey, hazel nut, pistachio, the thinnest most tenderest of apple, and one or two something elses.  The mix is very expensive, so I only bought a small amount, and I was savoring it.  I thought about how years ago when I was in group therapy for eating disorders, many of the women confessed to bingeing in the car.  I'd just gotten my driver's license when I entered group therapy for eating disorders, so I did not have a history of bingeing in cars.  Eating and cars has no particular associations for me.  When I typed that I thought of being a kid and driving with my family to White Castle for their little square hamburgers, affectionately known locally as "sliders."  We never ate them in the car though, we'd take them home and my brother and I would be bouncing for joy at getting to eat take-out, a rare occurrence when I was a kid.  It usually happened on Sunday evenings, my mother's self-proclaimed day off from cooking dinner.  I thought of the eros of Drive-In restaurants, the food served on a tray attached to the driver's rolled down window, teenagers trolling for someone to make out with post burger and shake.  I didn't have such a teenagerness.  My hijinx came later in life, which looking back I think was a fortunate thing, but probably is also why I still occasionally take a foolhardy turn, e.g., the buddhist.  But driving this evening, eating my expensive fruit and nut mix, I didn't think of my youth, I thought of how someone—I don't remember who—from Los Angeles, who drives a lot, once told me they frequently saw women driving in cars, bawling their heads off.  My Angelino narrator suggested that people cry in cars because that's the only place where no one will hear them wail.

All of this makes me think of the privacy of compulsions, engaging in behavior that no one dare know.  A devastating pleasure that leaves you spent, and you repeat it over and over again.  There's a gloriousness to that, even as it sucks the life out of you.  I wasn't feeling any such Bataillean intensity as I primly nibbled on my fruit and nut mix, but I was enjoying my drive alone.  I've been savoring my alone time; thus the lack of posting to this blog.  My journal is growing fat and I've been devouring books.  Ideas for my own book are exploding in my head, ideas which I scrawl down as quick as I can.  Oh wow, oh wow.  It all feels excruciatingly private, yet most of that privateness is being harvested for the book.  It's like the book is a jealous lover who won't tolerate a threesome with the blog.  Clearly the book and I need to sit down and have a talk about our relationship.  Dearest book, I think you're being a bit clingy.